A robocall is a mass telephony communications method wherein calls are initiated by an automated system instead of a human caller. These calls are a nuisance to individual customers and a resource drain on businesses. Robocallers can include spammers and spoofers. Features related to detecting and blocking robocalls have long been sought by the customers and businesses which have been adversely affected by robocalls. While various solutions exist, most are based on databases of known robocaller calling numbers either manually or semi-automatically maintained through customer reporting of bad parties. These complaint-based database solutions are useful but incomplete and suffer from disadvantages. For example, most of the databases are fragmented, with separate databases maintained by each carrier or service, and these databases are proprietary to the collector so information learned by one entity cannot be used in a general solution. At a national level, agencies of some governments maintain a national database of problem callers. For example, in the United States, the FCC maintains a customer complaint database. However, this database is more slowly evolving and generally considered lower quality than the commercially maintained databases.
There is a need for new and/or improved methods, systems and apparatus for overcoming the technical problem of how to effectively and efficiently detect and/or classify calls as actual or suspected robocalls. In addition, there is a need for new and/or improved methods, system and apparatus for overcoming the technical problem of detecting and/or classifying calls as actual or suspected robocalls through use of the characteristics of call(s) from a calling party without the need for a customer to report the call(s) as robocall(s). There is a further need for a solution to overcome the technical problem of how and what policies to apply to calls detected and/or classified as actual or suspected robocalls in an effective and efficient manner. There is a further need for new and/or improved methods, systems and apparatus for solving the technical problem of how to detect and/or classify calls as actual or suspected robocalls in situations where the robocaller has recently started or recently changed the calling number, the latter condition becoming increasingly frequent as bad actors iteratively circumvent the database-based filter solutions. Furthermore, there is a need for new and/or improved methods, systems and apparatus for overcoming the technical problem of how to efficiently detect and/or classify a call as actual or suspected robocall that do not require access to proprietary databases and, therein avoid the costs and licensing issues of incorporating such databases into a commercial product. There is also a need for new and/or improved methods, systems and apparatus for overcoming the technical problem of how to detect and/or classify calls as actual or suspected robocalls wherein it is not practical or desirable to require at least a subset of the local population to report or otherwise tag bad actors responsible for robocalls.